Leading with Grit Report

Hi Rainbow,

Welcome to your personalized Leading with Grit (LWG) Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during LWG.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of LWG delves deep into the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

First, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

Then, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values are self-direction, achievement, and benevolence.

When we talked about strengths the following week, you said your personality strength is agreeableness.

You said your top three talents are analytic, verbal, and intrapersonal.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to preparing my grad school application .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of LWG:

Work Smart

We looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Emailing people gives me anxiety .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When it is Friday at 11am, I will sit in front on my computer until all emails are replied .

These goals might be hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

We also talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Journaling .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

We then discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Apprehensive when receiving critical feedback, and Embarrassed when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

You reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being future goals .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

We looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Coach or mentor .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together.

We hope you have emerged from LWG a little grittier than you started.

We invite you to reflect on your own personal Grit Journey.

But remember, grit is not built in a day…

…and progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Leading With Grit team.